“So, you’re going out. . into the desert?”
“Yes.”
“But isn’t that where the Indians are?”
“Well, yes.”
“But my friend, as soon as they set eyes on you, they’ll kill you!”
“I hope I’ll have the chance to take proper precautions.”
Prilidiano did not insist, because his gadfly mind had already gone into reverse. However absurd the idea about some animals being descended from others might be, it had given him a notion as to how he might resolve the dilemma of his painting of Facunda taking her siesta. Which at the very least was proof that some ideas can descend from others. But he did not stop there (he always promised himself he would pick up the threads of his thoughts later on). It was no great matter that the Indians kill a traveler; that was a risk to be run like so many others. The question needed to be posed on a more general level. How could one be happy traveling? Wasn’t it a contradiction in terms? For years, he had been postponing his study trip to Europe because he could not imagine a life other than the one he was living, down to its minutest details. On the one hand he placed too much importance on happiness; on the other, he did not consider it so important that he should go in search of it. Painting and love were everywhere or they were nowhere. In a flash of inspiration of his childish, impish brain, Prilidiano got to the bottom of Darwinism and turned it completely upside down. Every change meant turning full circle. Eternity itself was a process of change, it was the present, the proof of happiness, and each and every one of these words was interchangeable.
“I’d really like to go with you,” he said, gloriously inconsistent, “but I can’t. I have so much to do!”
Before his expedition into the desert, Clarke paid a second and final visit to Palermo to say farewell to the Restorer and to thank him for providing him with a guide or “tracker,” a gaucho by the name of Gauna or Guana. He called on Rosas one Saturday afternoon at the epiphanic hour. After they had paid Manuelita the customary compliments, they shut themselves in Rosas’s office to talk. As usual, the Restorer looked relaxed and unkempt, his face bright red from all the wine he had drunk during a gargantuan barbecue he had eaten with the provincial governors. He smelled of grilled meat and wine. He had kept abreast of all the Englishman’s movements. That was the advantage of having a secret police, although it was no secret to anybody that he had one: he got to know everything about everybody else. But by the same token, they all knew everything about him, because in order to have a police force, he had to live a public life. Consequently,
the two of them wasted no time on practical matters. Instead, they talked about languages. Clarke’s Spanish was particularly good for a foreigner, something which he modestly put down to an innate talent. Rosas considered himself blessed with the same talent, to a remarkable degree. He had never put this to the test, nor did he need to do so, because his certainty required no proof. With such a gift, he was saying, he would like to try not such simple languages as English or French, but something really difficult like the babble of the black people. He might at any time decide to study and then write a grammar of the Argentine Bantu language. The Englishman nodded his assent.
“And please don’t think,” Rosas went on, “that I would be driven to this out of boredom, as I have no lack of things to keep me busy. And I do not mean simply political matters. If only you knew how many domestic problems I have to deal with! Take this fellow, for example. .” A little boy, one of his countless illegitimate children, had sneaked into the study, and was watching them from the depths of an armchair. “He has got it into his head to start squinting recently, and I’m worried he might get caught in a draught and stay stuck like that forever. I know that physiologically my fears are groundless, but I can’t help it, I can’t shake them off. He, however, could shake off his wretched habit, but he persists in it because he knows how much it upsets me.” The boy, a silent and pleasant-looking child, focused on them both perfectly well; perhaps he had no idea even of how to squint. “Although I must admit that when I was his age, I spent my whole time cross-eyed. But I’m not the kind of parent who is happy simply to say: ‘I was seven too once.’”
In response, Clarke merely nodded. He considered Rosas a genius; if not for languages, then for his “small talk.” This latest digression, for example, had been a ruse to find out just how much Clarke knew about Indian societies. But Clarke was not that stupid. Of course he knew what squinting meant to the Indians. Moreover, he was one of the few Europeans of his day who could have explained it in one of the native American languages. He had no intention however of telling the Restorer this, not even to fill a gap in the conversation.
“Well,” Rosas said, “are you hoping to discover a secret?”
Clarke replied that this was perhaps not the best way to describe his endeavor. The Legibrerian Hare he had been speaking of, which was the principal, if not the only, object of his expedition, was no secret. If it had been, how could he possibly expect to discover it with the limited means he had at his disposal, alone and lost in the vastness of the desert? Yet at the same time, it had to be one, for it to be worth all this trouble. Correctly phrased, the question would have to be: “What is so hidden that it is necessary to travel the globe to find it, but at the same time is so visible that it can be found simply by going to look for it? By definition, such a thing must be anywhere and everywhere, wherever one may be, in this very office. . ”
“But it’s not here,” Rosas replied, pretending to look under the table.
“That’s because the definition implies a circumlocution, because every definition can be considered a nominal one, and. .”
Rosas had followed him as closely as he was able, but even so his mind had wandered almost from the beginning, once he had grasped the main idea. He had sniffed Manuelita in there somewhere. Whatever else the famous Hare might or might not be, his daughter was it as well. And by his own hand. He had made this foolish girl the most completely visible element of his politics, but without providing any explanation, which was what made things visible. Darwin had been pointing in the same direction, but he had been so timid it was almost pitiful; he had found it necessary to base it on what Rosas had least need of: belief. As ever, an Argentine had got there first. He felt so pleased, so full of himself that he immediately took several decisions he had been hesitating over: first, to commission a full-length portrait of Manuelita from Pueyrredon’s son; second, to lend the Englishman Repetido for his journey; and third, to accede to the request he had received the previous day from the mother of Carlos Alzaga Prior, an aspiring young watercolor artist, and recommend that Clarke take him along. Everything fitted in, everything was part of the system. . he sat motionless for a moment, lost in the contemplation of his own grandeur.
2: The Legibrerian Hare
To carry on speaking, Cafulcurá took the cigar from his mouth with the slowest of gestures, wreathed the whole while in a cloud of smoke that gave off a medicinal odor. He muttered the words with his eyes half-closed, as he sat bare-chested on the leather mats strewn on the floor of the tent.
“Wouldn’t you say,” he said, “that travelers to the desert always come to impose some kind of law?”
Clarke spread his arms cautiously, palms outstretched: stated in such general terms, the proposition was irrefutable. The Indian chief’s way of speaking, which Clarke was listening to after an incident-free journey since setting out from Buenos Aires two weeks earlier, had a certain effeminate quality to it, at least on first acquaintance (but this was an impression which, like so many others, vanished with greater familiarity); an uncertainty, something imprecise which itself was not easy to define precisely. Which made it all the more difficult to find oneself in agreement with him on any point in particular.